A Comparative Analysis of the Works of J.G. Ballard and Philip.K. Dick from an Anglo-American Perspective

Similarities Between Their Works 

  

 Both writers shared themes.  That this is so, however, is unsurprising, as Dick for much of his career had to write within the constraints of American SF, while Ballard has admitted that, his first short stories, including his first, ”Passport to Eternity" were:

“influenced by a story by Jack Vance, called "Meet Miss Universe".  It was the best sort of that American science fiction.  "Passport to Eternity" was a summary of all the American SF I'd been reading over the past year in Canada.  (......)  I wanted to write for the American magazines.  It didn't occur to me to write for British ones.....” (V/Search, 1984, p.118).

 Thus the use of the stock themes of the genre such as time travel, the influence of the media on the lives of individuals, future dystopias and holocausts and so on by these writers is understandable, and it is difficult to ascertain any strong Anglo-American differences between them as Ballard has himself admitted that he was influenced by American SF.  Even the theme of altered/fake realities which Dick made his own was another stock theme of the genre.  Aldiss told me:

“At the start of the Cold War, fake realities were in vogue in science fiction.  Everyone wrote about them, but Dick took the theme over, partly because he was living in a series of them.  He had an amazing inventiveness, but was also a great synthesiser of  pre-existing SF things.  At the back of it all, of course, was his drug habit” (Interview with James Burr, 1996).

Thus the fact that both writers wrote time travel or fake reality stories doesn’t say very much - virtually every SF writer wrote stories using the same themes.  However, there are a number of stories where the basic plot of certain stories are the same.  Does the way Ballard and Dick handle the discourse of these plots tell us anything?

In 1954 Dick wrote a story called “Small Town” which appeared in Amazing in 1954.  In it he tells the story of a man who is hated by his wife who is having an affair with his friend.  He has a terrible job and few friends his only real passion being the perfect model of his town that he has been building in his basement.  After losing his job, the man starts to alter the town, removing enemies’ houses, making himself the Mayor of the new city hall, and so on.  On completing his changes he disappears, his wife and her lover assuming that he has finally gone into his own world.  It is only when they drive to the police station to report his disappearance that they notice that the factory is gone replaced by a new city hall, and as they realise what has happened they are pulled over by some cops from a new police station.

Dick wrote that:

“Here the frustrations of a defeated small person - small in terms of power, - gradually become transformed into something sinister: the force of death......  Be careful as to how you misuse (the put-upon person); he may not secretly wish to rule, he may wish to destroy.” (Dick, 1987, Second Variety, p493).

This is interestingly against many of the conventions of 50s SF, as it was generally very much in favour of preserving the status quo.  Heroes were generally in the military and/or scientists, and they were the people in power, the thinking being that who would want to read about a bum meeting a Martian?  Aldiss noted this difference between Dick and his contemporaries:

“Dick didn't go in for the traditional American optimism of writers such as Robert.A. Heinlein, and he seemed to possess a superior creativity.  There are often little human touches in an inhuman world, which is something that sets him apart from much of the American science-fiction of the time.  He also saw no glorious future for technology.  For Dick technology was little mechanical things scurrying around in the gutter” (Aldiss in Arena, 1996).

There are any number of reasons for this.  Partly, as poverty-stricken SF writer, he was denied not only the status and economic power that comes with wealth, but also the prestige of the “serious” writer.  Secondly, his agoraphobia and other mental problems led to his life being centred very much around his own home.  The impact he thus had on the world around him was limited.  And thirdly, someone who is virtually house-bound, has certain interests in the nature of and perception of reality, and was living in Berkeley in the 1960s, only had a limited choice of passing the time - taking drugs was almost an inevitability.  Thus as part of the counterculture he was almost certain to be opposed to the application of power by the select few.  Thus by writing a story about an utterly impotent man who finally gains power over those who scoff at him, Dick could have been writing a wish-fulfilment; where he had in many ways been failed by the American Dream, he was writing a story where this established order was brought down by the power of one man’s imagination - an idea that would have been irresistible to Dick as he typed away late at night.  (Indeed, Dick’s paranoia and pessimism in a field which at the time was generally optimistic, can be seen in his attitude to psi powers and superhuman mutants.  The prevailing attitude in SF in the 50s was that mutants were superior, and so normal people should view them as our leaders. However, Dick’s view was that:

“Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn’t seem worth leading.  Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as to where we might end up going.  It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren’t” (Dick, The Father-Thing, 1987, p474).

However, Ballard’s “small town” story is in some ways different.  In “The Last World of Mr. Goddard” (1967) Ballard describes the life of an elderly man who lives alone and works as a clerk in a department store.  Every night he examines his model of the town in which he lives - a town where tiny people go about their daily business under his benevolent gaze.  However, Goddard has no desire to rule these people; he simply uses his observations to create small-talk with his colleagues, to see which people look in need of advice.  However, one day his cat tips the town over and the little people try to escape only to be eaten by the cat.  Again, as in Dick’s story, events in the model town are repeated in the real one, Mr Goddard finally leaving his house and finding himself alone on the deserted streets. 

The reason for the very different ending to such a similar story, is directly related to Ballard’s nationality.  As an English writer who was interested in the Surrealists’ work and the nature of the unconscious, Ballard could write a story such as this, where he could project Goddard’s voyeuristic sociopathology (after all, most of his “interaction” with his neighbours was by watching them in the model) onto the outside world, without the restrictions of American SF.  Indeed, Ballard has said that, for him, SF was a genre that enabled him to write the kind of non-naturalistic fiction he wanted to write - but then again he made his name as part of the New Wave. Dick, on the other hand, was restricted by the genre’s rules (i.e. events must be scientifically possible, the story must be “idea-led” as opposed to character-led etc).

Further proof for this reading can be found in two other stories that share similar plot devices.  Both Ballard’s “Time of Passage” (1967) and Dick’s “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” (1966) describe the lives of the characters as time flows backwards.  However, Ballard uses the premise as a way of exploring human reactions to events (and how events are, or can be, related to human action), and has great fun with such concepts as the main character receiving a gold watch at the “start” of his career as a token of amiable good will.  He also uses this simple idea to in a pathetic way - for months he feels depressed, and doesn’t go to work, his feelings increasing until it is time for him to go to the cemetery to collect his wife.  Dick’s story on the other hand is a mish-mash of implausibility and half-baked ideas.  Whereas Ballard offers no explanations as to why time is going backwards, Dick is forced to create a pseudo-scientific machine that makes time do this.  Similarly, he has semantic problems as to which tense to use when writing a cause-and-effect plot-driven tale (characters say “Goodbye” when they meet, for example, but then have a perfectly ordinary conversation before they part, and say “hello”, for example.)

Other examples of two stories with a similar premise are Ballard’s “Now Wakes the Sea” (1967) and Dick’s “Breakfast at Twilight” (1954), both of which deal with “time-slips”.  In the former a man sees a giant primeval sea washing over his suburban town.  One night, he walks into the sea, sees a spectre-like woman, and accidentally falls down a shaft.  Two days later an investigating policeman visits some archaeologists who are working in the shaft, and have found two skeletons.  The archaeologist informs the policeman that the skeletons can’t be the missing man as they were laid down during the Triassic era, and so are 200 million years old.  The man had obviously somehow slipped back to the Triassic era, when his town was covered with water, and died there.

     In Dick’s story, it is 1970, and a normal suburban family wake to have breakfast, when their front door is kicked in by a group of soldiers.  The soldiers are amazed to find a house in the area as the entire neighbourhood has been bombed flat.  The soldiers tell them that it is 1980 and that the country is at War with the Soviets and is a disease-ridden wasteland.  The family are thus presented with a choice; either try to make a new life in the hellish future, or wait for the next bomb raid to perhaps push them back in time as the bomb raid the previous night had brought them forwards.  Seeing the misery of the future, they crowd in the cellar, and their destroyed house returns to 1970.  But they now know that it is only a matter of years until the War happens, but by then there will be no slipping back.

Here again, as in the previous two stories, the differences between the handling of two stories with the same “time-slip” premise are ultimately Anglo-American.  Dick’s story, originally published in Amazing, was written within the rigid confines of 50s American SF, and intended for sale in one of the pulp magazines.  Thus there is a strong adventure-element - bombs, guns, soldiers describing the atomic wasteland etc, and there is also a pseudo-scientific explanation for why the events of the story happen.  In this case, “the concentrated energy (of the bombing raid), ......the destruction of matter, sucked the house into the future” (Dick, Second Variety, 1987, p276).

Ballard on the other hand was not writing for the pulp magazines, but already had a contract for a number of short story collections with Berkeley Books.  Also, unlike Dick who was trying to support himself solely by his writing and thus wrote over thirty short stories a year during the mid-fifties, Ballard had a full-time job, thus could craft his stories in such a way that he was pleased with them as literature, rather than just so they could be quickly sold.  Also, Ballard was more interested in exploring the unconscious of the protagonist through a surrealist symbolism where his unconscious mind is somehow projected onto external reality.  Here, as in “Time of Passage”, the “idea” of time flowing backwards or of slipping in time (which was supposed to be the core of SF stories), was not as important as the symbolism of returning to the womb.  Indeed, in “Now Wakes the Sea”, the protagonist finds himself waist-deep in the sea, sinking “in the shoals of luminous algae”, this primeval sea representing the biological soup from which all life, not just an individual life as in the case of the womb, springs.  When Ballard writes these “water stories” he is exploring the protagonist’s desire to return to the past, to a time of preconsciousness.  It is important that the protagonist is recovering from a nervous breakdown and describes the sea as, “.....a sort of memory......” (Ballard, The Disaster Area, 1979, p86).

As has been already mentioned, both writers were interested in representations of reality.  Ballard once tried to question the nature of reality by planning a performance art “happening” where someone would try to rob a bank by holding up a card with the word “Pistol” written on it, the inspiration coming from the fact that a robbery using a toy gun is still considered as armed robbery in the eyes of the law.  This questioning of representations of reality is very similar to the surrealist painter Magritte’s painting La Trahisons des Images, where the viewer is reminded that the painting of the pipe is not a pipe.  Dick actually wrote a novel based on this premise.  In Time Out Of Joint , the characters believe it is 1959, until the hero "goes sane", and realises that it is really 1996.  This 'finding of sanity' is ingeniously described, in one 'episode' the hero is standing at a soft-drink stand, when it disappears to be replaced by a piece of paper with the words “SOFT-DRINK STAND” written on it.       

 Next week: The Differences between their works.

Reference List

Aldiss, B.W. (1970) The Shape of Further Things, Faber and Faber, London.

Aldiss, B.W. (1973) Billion Year Spree: History of Science Fiction, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London.

Aldiss, B.W. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Aldiss, B.W., Weldon, F. (1994) Arena, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).

Allen, R. (1991) "Empire, Imperialism and Literature" in Allen, R., Calder, A., Haveley, C.P., Martin, G. and Rossington, M. (eds) (1991) End Of Empire, The Open University, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Last World of Mr Goddard" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Gentle Assassin" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1979) "Now Wakes The Sea” in The Disaster Area, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1980) "Time of Passage" in The Venus Hunters HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1981) Hello America, Vintage, London.

Carter, P.A. (1977) The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Columbia University Press, New York.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Meddler" in Beyond Lies The Wub: Volume One Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Breakfast At Twilight" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Small Town" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Prominent Author" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Sales Pitch" in The Father-Thing: Volume Three Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: Volume Five Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1991) Ubik, Vintage Books, New York.

Dick, P.K. (1994) Horizon, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).

Dick, P.K. (1996) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, HarperCollins Publishers, London.

Galen, R. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Priest, C, (1978) “New Wave” in Holdstock, R. (ed) Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Cathay Books, London.

Sutin, L. (1991) Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, HarperCollins, London.

Sutin, L. (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Vintage, New York.

V/Search, (1984) J.G. Ballard, Vale and Juno, San Francisco.

Weldon, F. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Wilson, C. (1976) Strength To Dream, Sphere Books, London.

A Comparative Analysis of the Works of J.G. Ballard and Philip.K. Dick from an Anglo-American Perspective - Introduction

Today starts a lengthy comparative analysis of the works of Philip.K. Dick and J.G. Ballard from an Anglo-American perspective.  Over the next few weeks, this analysis will cover similarities between their work, differences between their work and an analysis of their representations of America in their writing.  But today we will start with an Introduction to two of the finest genre writers of the Twenteth Century and to the topic in general.




A Comparative Analysis of the Works of J.G. Ballard and Philip.K. Dick from an Anglo-American Perspective  -  Introduction

Philip.K. Dick once said that in America:

“the position that writers such as myself hold in America is very lowly.  Science fiction is considered something for adolescents to read.  And then I discovered that in Europe, especially in France, science fiction was taken seriously, and the science fiction writer wasn’t considered something on the level of a janitor” (Dick, 1994). 

This perception of SF as juvenile entertainment in America, yet not in the rest of the world, is the key not only to how Ballard’s and Dick’s work was received, but also to how they approached their work.  And the fact that this difference existed is borne out by their respective careers, and their relations to the genre. 

Indeed, from his earliest attempts at writing, Dick believed that he wrote two distinctively different kinds of fiction - SF and “mainstream/ literary” fiction, and it was his non-SF work which for decades meant far more to him than any success within the SF genre.  Despite having six SF novels published between 1955 and 1960, he also wrote eleven mainstream novels in this period, eventually abandoning SF altogether in 1956 and 1957 in order to concentrate on these "literary" efforts.  The publishing house Harcourt Brace, rejected his mainstream novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written in 1959) and contracted him to write two more non-SF novels, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and The Man in the High Castle, both of which they later refused to publish.  However, his SF work continued to prove popular, and did receive reviews outside of the fanzine world of SF.  The New York Times reviewed The Man in the High Castle, and deemed it “scarifying”, hardly the kind of literary criticism he longed for of his work, and in 1963 it won the Hugo award, SF’s highest honour.  This lead Dick to concentrate on his “SF” work, writing eleven such novels in 1963 and 1964.

However, Dick found the categorising of his work to be a continuing problem.  When Martian Time-Slip was published, Dick felt that he “had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction” (Sutin, 1991, p117), but instead found that it was rejected by every hardcover publisher because it was set on Mars and so, therefore had to be SF, while many SF publishers rejected it because it offended science fiction sensibilities in that a Martian would have been impossible by 1994.  Similarly, Dick wrote several letters to his publishers begging them to treat his analysis of the sixties drug scene, A Scanner Darkly as non-science fiction - although his name as an SF writer was enough to prompt the editors of Doubleday to reject the idea without even reading the manuscript. 

It is interesting therefore, that it is Dick’s SF work that has led to his status as a “literary” writer - albeit some 35 years after his death.  Russ Galen, Dick's literary agent since 1977, believes that:

"..... the science-fiction language he used repelled a large audience because of the stigma associated with it.  His work was as relevant in the sixties, and would have been more popular than now had it not been for the externals of the genre, that made people think the material wasn't worthwhile" (Interview with James Burr, 1996).

Fay Weldon agrees:  "Dick was a serious writer posing as a science fiction writer.  He had a view

of reality as an iceberg.  What lay under what could be seen was a great shifting mass of unreality.  His work dealt with an unliteral world in literary terms, using the vocabulary of everyday life to give a simplified view of profound philosophical notions" (Interview with James Burr, 1996).

     

However, this is a relatively recent development, and certainly in the world of American publishing in the 60s there was a polarisation between SF and so-called “literary” writing.  Britain and the rest of Europe, however, seem to have been far less likely to categorise work into commercial genres.  In 1955 the British publisher Rich and Cowan published a short story collection (A Handful of Darkness) in hardback, an honour rarely accorded to science fiction in the US at the time.  Similarly, as Dick himself said, his “SF” novels were well-received in France.   In 1966 he was elected as an honorary member of "The College du Pataphysique" in France because of Ubik, and Jean Baudrillard has hailed Dick as one of the greatest experimental writers of our era, praising Dick’s works as “a total simulation without origin, past or future” (Sutin, 1995, pxxvi). Indeed, during the mid-seventies much of Dick’s income came from overseas sales.

    

Ballard too, noticed the more rigid categorisations prevalent in American publishing as opposed to British:

"To some extent it reminds me of the huge disservice which American writers of the old Analog school .....have rendered to the cause of SF.  There were commercial constraints and conventions that I felt severely handicapped the American and British writers of the early '50s.”  (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p119).

   

However Ballard’s experiences as an SF writer are much different to Dick’s.  He was a mainstay of the well-respected New Worlds magazine where the New Wave of science fiction was born, and his publisher was not a trashy SF paperback publisher, but Berkeley books.  Indeed, Ballard’s association with the New Wave worked to his advantage tremendously, as he was seen as a young, hip writer, which on the campuses of the late 60s helped boost sales and literary “coolness”.  As New Wave writer Christopher Priest notes:

“The purpose of the New Wave was to release writers and readers from the preconceptions of the pulp magazine idiom”  (Priest, 1978, p170).

     

Younger writers responded to the cultural upheavals of the sixties and rejected the formulaic restrictions of the previous one.  The first beginnings of the New Wave were in London.  At the time London was at the centre of popular culture - in music, fashion and the visual arts.  At the forefront of the New Wave was Michael Moorcock, who edited New Worlds magazine.  Moorcock rejected many of the older SF writers, focusing instead on the likes of Ballard and William Burroughs.  The kind of fiction New Worlds published, especially with its loudly proclaimed aims of reflecting the sexually liberated, drug-taking times which spawned it, proved popular, and soon many young American writers such as Thomas Disch, John Sladek and Pamela Zoline relocated to London.  When the American writer and anthologist Judith Merril moved to England, putting together anthologies of this new SF, the kind of fiction they were writing became known as the New Wave.  By 1968, however, the deliberate obscurity and experimentalism of much of the New Wave work had resulted in a certain lack of interest in England.  However, America had latched onto the style and the likes of Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany were producing New Wave work outside of the confines of New Worlds, culminating in the movement’s defining moments - the publication of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies in 1967 and 1972.  Dangerous Visions drew together the New Worlds writers (the English Ballard and Moorcock, and the American expatriates, Disch and Delaney), with newer American writers, as well as some of the more experimental established writers - Dick among them.  Indeed, Dick, like many of the fifties SF writers had been worried about being regarded as passe, but what with his (apparently false) claims to have written his Dangerous Visions story under the influence of LSD, and the success of his hallucinogenic novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch his popularity continued to grow.

      

There were profound differences between the English and American “New Wave”, however.  As Christopher Priest notes in his essay “New Wave”:

“The American argument was about a product: a ‘type’ of story with an invented label. The process which Moorcock and others had been encouraging writers to explore, was to find an individual approach to writing speculative fiction.......and this process could only be understood by each writer in his own terms.  (......)  The American controversy therefore centred on the wrong area.  They were not saying: should we or should we not rethink our ideas about SF?  They actually said: is it a good or a bad thing that the New Wave should exist?” (Priest, 1978, p170).

In many ways, the way that America received the New Wave sums up its attitudes towards SF in general.  Where the likes of Ballard saw the SF idiom as a means of expressing their artistic vision most freely, in America it was seen, not as possible literature but only as juvenile entertainment, so that when the New Wave offered writers and editors artistic freedom, they reacted in the only way they knew how - they treated it as a sub-genre of SF.  Indeed, Dick’s work (labelled “Nuts” by 50s SF editor Herb Gold) changed little during the New Wave period, it was only the way that he was perceived as “hip” that altered, and Ballard himself has said that:

"As soon as I started writing for the American magazines, I started to get a lot of rejections.  It was obvious to me that the conventions of American SF were very tight and prescriptive. If I'd had the freedom to do so (my italics) I'd have been publishing experimental SF long before the mid-'60s.” (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p122).

Thus all the New Wave allowed both writers to do was to write what they had always wanted to write, without the strict genre guidelines of 50s American SF.  However, Dick was one of the few New Wave writers who had been working in the genre since the 50s, having thirty stories appear in 1953, and twenty-eight published in 1954.  In that same year he started to write novels, having six SF novels published between 1955 and 1960.  As an American being published in the pulps (the likes of Astounding and Amazing), Dick was perhaps unusual in that he did see his work as artistically valid and not just trash, as many of his countrymen, including the SF writers themselves, did.  As Ballard once commented, “I came across philistine attitudes in many of the American writers in the '60s when I began to meet them.” (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p122).

By 1967 Dick had become increasingly worried about his amphetamine intake, yet despite his fears he continued to take them because he thought that they helped him to write; he wrote 140 pages of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1970) in one forty-eight hour burst.  In 1970 he moved to Vancouver for a year, his stay ending in his fourth nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt.  In April 1972 he returned to California, finished Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and started work on his classic analysis of the sixties drug scene A Scanner Darkly.  He married an eighteen year old psychiatric patient and a son was born in 1973.

In February to March 1974 Dick experienced a number of visions, as (he claimed) pink beams of light beamed information into his head, and allowed him to communicate with God, and he spent the rest of his life writing his 8000 page long Exegesis; an attempt to try and explain his experiences.  In February 1976 his fifth wife left him, and he tried to kill himself again, for what was to be the last time in his life.  He found it difficult to extrapolate his visions into novel form, although he finally succeeded in his experimental novel, Valis.  However in 1982 he was found unconscious in his apartment, the victim of a stroke, and he died several days later.

Dick was widely-read, his biographer, Lawrence Sutin, describing his reading as “virtually limitless, from technical papers on physics..... to Jung, Kant and William Burroughs,” and he describes how Dick would frequently cite Stendhal, Flaubert, and especially Maupassant as influences on his work, learning how to structure the short stories of the early fifties on Maupassant’s stories in particular (Sutin, 1991, p3).  In a 1969 Questionnaire for SF writers, he recommended that any young writer should base the structure of their novels on the novels of a writer that they admired: “I, for instance, based my first novels on the structure used by A.E. van Vogt” (Sutin, L. 1995, p65).

In the same questionnaire, he also recommended young writers who want to create “realistic” characters and effective dialogue to: “read modern quality writing, especially the short pieces of Algren, Styron, Herb Gold, the so-called New School writers.  And the fine left-wing writers of the thirties, such as Dos Passos, Richard Wright, and go back as far as Dreiser and Hawthorne - try to stick to American writers, because it is among the American writers that realistic dialogue has developed.  Try the French realists, such as Flaubert, for plot and characterisation.  Avoid Proust and other subjective-type writers.  And by all means intently study James Joyce, everything from his early short stories to Finnegans Wake” (Sutin, 1995, p65).

However, SF played a major role in Dick’s development as a writer and his choice of SF as his favoured genre.  From childhood he read the SF pulps such as Amazing and Unknown Worlds, a collection that he cherished for decades.  However, this interest in SF declined sharply when he moved into a shared house with a number of aspiring writers when eighteen.  In a 1977 interview Dick admitted that he had continued to read SF but that the Berkeley culture of the late forties “required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.”  In 1968 he said, “Let us simply say that I gained a working knowledge of literature from (Xenophon’s) Anabasis to Ulysses” (Sutin, 1991). 

        

Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle  had many direct literary influences that Dick openly cited.  First his basic premise of a world where the Axis powers won the Second World War was influenced by Ward Moore’s novel Bring the Jubilee  (1953) in which the South won the Civil War, and also the I Ching .  Dick had the characters ask the I Ching questions in the novel, and then would base the novel’s future events on what the I Ching would tell him when Dick consulted it on their behalf.    

However, in the same way that Ballard claims to have been influenced more by visual artists, especially the Surrealists, Dick too was influenced by arts other than the literary.  To Gregg Rickman (in Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words (1984)) he described his novel Mary and the Giant as a retelling of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Schilling seduced and destroyed by a young woman, and quotations from operatic libretti abound in his SF novels, particularly from Wagner and Gilbert and Sullivan.

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, and lived there until he was fifteen.  He has said of Shanghai that it was:

“an American zone of influence.  All the foreign nationals there lived an American style of life.  They had American-style houses, air-conditioning and refrigerators, and American cars.  We had Coca-Cola - and American-style commercial radio stations which blared out American programs and radio serials.” (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p112).

After the attack on Pearl Harbour he was interned by the Japanese in a civilian prison camp.  He moved to England in 1946, but was shocked by the lack of impact the War seemed to have on British culture. 

"It seemed a world of self-enclosed little suburbs and village greens where nothing had ever happened.  To come from Shanghai, and from the War itself where everything had been shaken to its foundations, to come to England and find this narrow-minded, puritanical world - this was the most repressed society I'd ever known!” (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p114).

After leaving school he read medicine at King's College, Cambridge then went to London University to read English Literature.  He became interested in psychoanalysis and began to read every library book he could find.  He also started to read many of the leading writers of the day, such as Kafka and Hemingway.  He also became interested in the Surrealists, more the visual Surrealists than the literary ones, although he did read Jarry and Appollinaire.  By 22 he had worked for an advertising agency and as an encyclopaedia salesman, eventually joining the RAF because he “wanted to get out of England desperately” (V/Search, 1984, p117), and he had discovered that the flight training was done in Canada.  It was there that he discovered various American SF magazines, and he decided that SF was a genre that could contain the richness of his ideas. 

     

On returning to England he was an editor of technical and scientific journals, and he got to know many of the early English Pop artists, the Independent Group.  He felt a kinship with their belief that the media landscape was a proper subject matter for the artist, and he believed that it was these subjects that SF should explore, not aliens and far-off worlds.  He married in 1955, his first short story appearing in 1956.  In his early thirties he wrote The Wind from Nowhere in his fortnight's annual holiday, in an attempt to make a break and become a professional writer - it was a moderate success and it led to various short story collections being published.  His semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, won the 1984 Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize.

While at school Ballard, “read on .......the international menu, not the English one” (V/Search, 1984, p119), but as an adult writer, he has claimed to be influenced more by the surrealist painters than any writer, although he does admire the work of William Burroughs immensely.  However, his disdain for many contemporary writers is also well-known.  In 1984 he said:

"I think William Burroughs is without doubt the greatest American writer since W.W.II.  There are very, very few writers in his class; I think Genet is about the only one whom I'd put in the same category.  All the other British and American writers so heavily touted - the Styrons and Mailers and their English equivalents - it's just not necessary to read anybody except Burroughs and Genet” (Ballard in V/Search, 1984, p6).

Next Week:  The Similarities Between Their Work

Reference List

Aldiss, B.W. (1970) The Shape of Further Things, Faber and Faber, London.

Aldiss, B.W. (1973) Billion Year Spree: History of Science Fiction, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London.

Aldiss, B.W. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Aldiss, B.W., Weldon, F. (1994) Arena, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).

Allen, R. (1991) "Empire, Imperialism and Literature" in Allen, R., Calder, A., Haveley, C.P., Martin, G. and Rossington, M. (eds) (1991) End Of Empire, The Open University, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Last World of Mr Goddard" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Gentle Assassin" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1979) "Now Wakes The Sea” in The Disaster Area, Panther Books, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1980) "Time of Passage" in The Venus Hunters HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Ballard, J.G. (1981) Hello America, Vintage, London.

Carter, P.A. (1977) The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Columbia University Press, New York.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Meddler" in Beyond Lies The Wub: Volume One Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Breakfast At Twilight" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Small Town" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Prominent Author" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Sales Pitch" in The Father-Thing: Volume Three Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1987) "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: Volume Five Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Dick, P.K. (1991) Ubik, Vintage Books, New York.

Dick, P.K. (1994) Horizon, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).

Dick, P.K. (1996) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, HarperCollins Publishers, London.

Galen, R. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Priest, C, (1978) “New Wave” in Holdstock, R. (ed) Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Cathay Books, London.

Sutin, L. (1991) Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, HarperCollins, London.

Sutin, L. (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Vintage, New York.

V/Search, (1984) J.G. Ballard, Vale and Juno, San Francisco.

Weldon, F. (1996) Interview with James Burr.

Wilson, C. (1976) Strength To Dream, Sphere Books, London.

"MWC ISO RL" shortlisted

Just received the good news that my flash fiction piece "MWC ISO RL" has been shortlisted in the Worcestershire Litfest Flash Fiction Competition 2017.  So I'm in this year's anthology and will do a reading at the anthology launch, at least.

Apparently the final results will be released in a few days.

Worcestershire LitFest Flash Fiction Competition 2007 shortlist announced.

Nanny Knows Best - Epilogue

As I pointed out here, I've long been a fan of collections of short stories that not only have interlinking themes, plots and characters but which are also "top-and-tailed" by an interlinking prologue and epilogue.

Last year I wrote "Nanny Knows Best", a short story which I knew would act as a prologue for the State of the Nation collection (see reading, below).  This has since been broadcast on Dave Reeves' Radio Wildfire spoken word show.

This Summer, I finally got round to writing the Epilogue, the tail of the collection, if you will.  I had a vague idea of what I wanted to accomplish with this but a final definitive story just wouldn't come.  For a long time, as the story is a critique of the Nanny State and overbearing Public sector, I toyed with doing a variant of the following joke, with Nanny being the narrator:


"I'm tired. For a couple of years I've been blaming it on iron poor blood, lack of vitamins, dieting and a dozen other maladies. But now I found out it ain't that. I'm tired because I'm overworked.

The population of USA is 237 million. 104 million are retired.

That leaves 133 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school, which leave 48 million to do the work. Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government. This leaves 19 million to do the work.

Four million are in the Armed Forces, which leaves 15 million to do the work.

Take from the total the 14,800,000 people who work for State and City Government and that leaves 200,000 to do the work.

There are 188,000 in hospitals, so that leaves 12,000 to do the work. Now, there are 11,998 people in Prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work. You and me.

Boy Oh Boy. And you're sitting there reading this. No wonder I'm tired, I'm the only one working."

However, I just couldn't think of a way of making that work, even within the confines of a satire, so nothing came of it.  I finally worked out what it needed to do by simply going back to basics and thinking, "What exactly am I satirising here?  What am I criticising?"  And that's when the final story came to me and then came out, fully-formed, in one writing session.  While this doesn't happen very often, these are always the best stories, in my eyes.

Anyway, without further ado, please see "Nanny Knows Best - Epilogue", the final, concluding story to the State of the Nation collection:

“Nanny Knows Best - Epilogue”

“What we have here,” Nanny said to the Judge, “is a blatant disregard for law and all social etiquette.”  He wagged his finger at the defendant.  “This Client has gone out of his way to break the Abolition of Death Act time and time again.”

Nanny paced the Court-room and addressed the twelve Clients who sat in their padded, slightly ululating Chairs™, some farting and dozing, others gurgling contentedly as their IV drips slowly fed them sedatives and perfectly balanced Liqui-Meal™.

“As a society we have made great strides in Public Health.  Our forbears consigned the Social Evils of smoking, drinking and obesity to the history books.  Exercise has been prescribed and perfect nutrition implemented.  The emotional stressors of social inequality - jealousy, envy, despair – have been eliminated.  The negative health impact vectors of personal desire, personal responsibility and indeed any kind of emotional inner life have been removed.  And all at the cost of only a hundred trillion pounds, a bargain at half the price I am sure we would all agree.”

The Nannies murmured their assent as one of the Clients shrieked in delight when a fly landed on his nose and he clumsily pawed at it with meaty fingers.  There was a beeping noise as a sensor in his Chair™ detected the secretion of dangerous levels of adrenaline and serotonin in his bloodstream and an automated plunger squeezed down in a syringe and he was settled.

“Yet this Client, despite all these breakthroughs in Public Health, stubbornly and obstinately refuses to obey the law!”  He pointed at the defendant, his stiff, pale body wedged into the dock in such a way that it would not collapse onto the floor.

“It was found that the Client had acted in a way inconsistent with the Abolition of Death Act in October of last year.  As is customary in such cases the Client was issued with a Cessation of Behaviour Notice and warned about the dangerous and anti-social aspects of his actions.  However, despite this, when the Client’s Nanny returned to his Home™ the following day, he found that the Client was continuing to indulge in risky and anti-social behaviours contrary to life.”

An usher, discretely stepped forward to swat some of the flies that were gathering around the ripe-smelling corpse.

“At this point his Nanny had no choice but to distribute “I like being alive!”™ stickers around the Client’s Home™.  Recent research has determined that these stickers have a 95% success rate in preventing death addicts from succumbing to previously ingrained, personally destructive behaviours, such as lacking life.  So of course you can imagine his Nanny’s sheer horror to discover that, on his next visit, the Client was continuing to insist on being dead.”

Not being sat in the thermostatically moderated environment of a Chair™, the defendant’s body had started to bloat in the summer heat and it jerked noisily in the dock as its abdomen swelled, his head lolling grotesquely to the side.

“However, never let it be said that the role of the Ministry is to persecute the dead.  Rather it is to prevent death.  So, the Client was then given another opportunity to moderate his behaviour by attending a half-day Life Awareness session.   His Nanny at the session reports that he was….  Nanny flicked through some papers as he tried to find the correct quote from the report.  ““….Quiet, attentive and clearly reflecting on the experience.””  He closed the papers and turned to the Judge.  “But yet again, when his Nanny visited him the following day he was continuing to act in contravention of the Law and stubbornly refusing to live.”

The defendant stared at him with milky, unseeing eyes.

“Milord, I contend that this Client should face the full sanctions available to this court.  His refusal to even mount a defence of his actions surely only adds to his obvious guilt.”

Nanny sat down as the Judge considered the case before him.  One of the Clients gurgled and slapped his thighs, a line of drool slowly dripping from his chin.  The judge nodded, coughed and turned to the accused.  “It seems that the judgement of this court is that the defendant’s wilful obstinacy in maintaining outdated behaviours and his continuing refusal to act in a manner befitting a progressive society are both obvious and somewhat foul-smelling.  It is therefore the decision of this court that the defendant is found guilty, final sentencing to be undertaken in a fortnight.”

The judge struck his gavel and shuffled from the courtroom as the defendant was dragged from the Court, leaving a slime-trail of putrefying flesh behind him.  Other Nannies murmured their approval and gathered around Nanny, congratulating him.

And as they shook his hand and slapped his back and exclaimed “Well done!” and “That’ll teach him!”, Nanny could only feel great pride in his work.  For decades his forebears had struggled with keeping their Clients safe from themselves and their own unfathomable behaviour.  Yet despite the taxes and bans and media propaganda nothing had really worked.  Until the Abolition of Death Act.  

Yes, statistics from the Ministry demonstrated that there was a 100% successful conviction rate for contravening the Act, clear and quantifiable evidence of its undeniable success.

Nanny smiled and walked down the Courthouse steps, eager to continue his important work.

Copyright © James Burr 2016

Six PKD short story radio adaptations

While Philip.K. Dick fans are waiting for Electric Dreams: The World of Philip.K. Dick to debut on Channel 4, they might find their cravings sated, at least slightly, by a number of audio adaptations of Dick's work.  Open Culture have collected together six readings and radio adaptations of some of Dick's shorter fiction - “Impostor,” “The Preserving Machine,”  “Colony,” “Sales Pitch,” “The Defenders” and “The Builder.”

These are mainly from Dick's super-prolific (2 or 3 stories a week) "SF pulp" period of the late 50s.  But even in these pulpy stories, the sheer range and power of his ideas are often visible and I don't know about you, but even if some of these tales do often suffer from the amount of time devoted to their writing, they still have that warm, nostalgic feel of classic "zap gun/marauding robots" 50s science fiction so are well worth listening to.

As always though, even in these tales, PKD is uncannily prescient.  Here in "Sales Pitch" he basically predicts pop-ups, spam and personalised advertising, even down to the never-ending pimping of weight loss products and fat burners.

Enjoy!

A Cache of Flashes

Black Pear Press have announced the publication of their 2016 Worcestershire LitFest Flash Fiction Anthology, A Cache Of Flashes, in which my shortlisted story "Genuine Photo"will appear.  The launch of the anthology will take place at 4pm at Drummonds Bar, The Swan with Two Nicks, 28 New Street, Worcester WR1 2DP on Sunday 20th November 2016.  I'll be reading the story at the launch and hopefully filming it, to be posted here at some point in the future.

Mindwebs - 153 Classic Speculative short fiction readings

I came across this recently although I've only had a chance to listen to a few of them.  Mindwebs is a collection of 153 SF and speculative short story readings from a radio series that ran on WHA Radio in Madison, Wisconsin from the mid 70's until the mid 90's.  The readings are further enhanced by sound FX, music and some guest voices and there is a heavy emphasis on one of my favourite periods of SF, the 60s New Wave, with readings of stories by PKD, Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison, as well as stories from other giants of the genre such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur.C. Clarke, Robert Bloch and H.P. Lovecraft.


Well worth a listen if you are a fan of spoken word and/or classic speculative fiction.